With that out of the way, let's take a look at Stein' policy platform. Overall, I agree with most of it, and think the world would be better off if large parts of it were implemented. The glaring, almost fatal flaw of the whole thing though, is that as President, Jill Stein would have almost no power to actually do anything in her platform.
Take her economic initiatives.
She talks about setting up a $15/hr minimum wage, of breaking up Too Big To Fail banks and democratizing the Federal Reserve, along with other niceties like equal pay, paid sick leave, and stronger worker protections. If you haven't spotted the common thread between these things, it's they all require new legislation from Congress to actually become things that happen in the real world. And I don't know if you've been paying attention or not, but Congress hasn't exactly been known for getting, well, anything done for the last six years. How President Stein would get these rather controversial measures through a hostile Congress (because, make no mistake, the Democrats are just as hostile to those measures as Republicans) is left up to voter's imaginations, since Stein declines to actually recognize this as a problem on her website.
This pattern pretty much is her platform. On health, she wants to ensure Medicare for all in a country where the health care system devised by the very free market Heritage Foundation had trouble passing and has been characterized from day one as a government takeover of healthcare even though it is very much not. Also, that's still something Congress has to do. There's her Green Deal employment program, which basically seeks to retrofit the country's infrastructure to renewable energy grids by 2030. To do this, the funds would either have to come from new taxes or deficit spending and she would need a bill dedicating those funds to these projects. Which, again, Congress.
A lot of the projects and goals included in the platform are good ones, and even if we didn't achieve them, the results we would get from working on them would vastly improve our country. But there's a fundamental dishonesty at the bottom of this that undoes the lofty aspirations. Because, in truth, this is a legislative platform, not an executive one. President Stein would have as much power to implement this agenda that regular, citizen Stein has, which is to say, exactly fuck all.
This pattern pretty much is her platform. On health, she wants to ensure Medicare for all in a country where the health care system devised by the very free market Heritage Foundation had trouble passing and has been characterized from day one as a government takeover of healthcare even though it is very much not. Also, that's still something Congress has to do. There's her Green Deal employment program, which basically seeks to retrofit the country's infrastructure to renewable energy grids by 2030. To do this, the funds would either have to come from new taxes or deficit spending and she would need a bill dedicating those funds to these projects. Which, again, Congress.
A lot of the projects and goals included in the platform are good ones, and even if we didn't achieve them, the results we would get from working on them would vastly improve our country. But there's a fundamental dishonesty at the bottom of this that undoes the lofty aspirations. Because, in truth, this is a legislative platform, not an executive one. President Stein would have as much power to implement this agenda that regular, citizen Stein has, which is to say, exactly fuck all.
When it comes to power in this country, and how government actually works, there is already enough confusion over who gets to do what. Since people don't understand the roles of the bodies of government, they take all of it on face value and elect Presidents on promises they don't have the power to keep. And this ignorance is exactly the thing Jill Stein is trading and playing off of, her entire platform is built on it and takes the legislative gains as a given. It's a platform built on
the fantasy of its goals instead of laying out how to actually achieve them, which makes it little more than worthless.
You can say "Well that's what Democrats and Republicans do," but if your goal is to provide a different political vision, one that is better than the mainstream body politic, than you can't really engage in the same underhanded tactics of the people you're trying to usurp. Because at that point, instead of trying to change the game, you become a lightweight fighting a heavyweight, and losing is all you'll do or deserve.
the fantasy of its goals instead of laying out how to actually achieve them, which makes it little more than worthless.
You can say "Well that's what Democrats and Republicans do," but if your goal is to provide a different political vision, one that is better than the mainstream body politic, than you can't really engage in the same underhanded tactics of the people you're trying to usurp. Because at that point, instead of trying to change the game, you become a lightweight fighting a heavyweight, and losing is all you'll do or deserve.
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